The Wild Wild West of the World Wide Web.

• Author: Toscano, Paul
• Position: Brief Article

Who's going to govern the virtual world?

Cyberspace is a frontier only recently colonized by ordinary people. Although technological mountain men have been thriving in this environment for some time, for ordinary cyber settlers, virtual life can be ineffectual. It can be, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, "nasty, cruel, brutish and short."

The thorniest problems in cyberspace are the lack of security, privacy and integrity in the creation, collection, transmission, processing, storage and use of electronic and digital information.

Like the Wild West, the cyber frontier must be tamed. It needs rules. But cyber citizens can't rely on a local sheriff or a federal marshal to enforce order. Cyberspace is unbounded. "Who's going to govern the virtual world?" is a recurring question with no satisfactory answer.

Any government seems disabled by its inability to enforce order beyond its territorial limits. And self-regulation seems doomed by the profit motive, which encourages private companies to foster rules that tip the playing field in their favor. To date, there isn't even a consensus on what security, privacy and integrity of information mean, let alone how these values may be preserved in the cyber world, says David Johnson in his book, "The Rise of Law on the Global Network."

Following are some definitions and a brief blueprint for achieving informational security, privacy and integrity while avoiding both the biases of the private sector and the control of government.

Security. As used here, security refers to three different protections with respect to digital or electronic information. First, it refers to the protection of information being transmitted from a known source to an intended recipient only. Second, it is the protection of information being stored, transmitted, processed, or used without compromise, alteration or corruption. And, third, it is protecting information being linked to any real-world person whose identity has been reliably authenticated and represented by a verifiable cyber identity, such as a digital certificate, digital signature, or other electronic identification.

Privacy. Informational privacy is a bit more difficult to define. My approach is to compare electronic information to property and then come up with a privacy definition that works for both. To establish privacy in real estate, for example, land must first be separated from the surrounding territory by creating boundaries and establishing ownership by...